I walked into my cousin’s farmhouse in southwestern Minnesota the other day, interrupting a Skype conversation with her daughter in Belgium.

She was smiling, obviously enjoying the chat and happy to connect with a family member on the other side of the world. After she hung up, I asked about her Internet connection.

DSL.

How do you like it?

Terrible. Speed problems. Tried a vendor in a nearby town but it couldn’t serve her.

Here she was, doing something that was impossible a few years ago and still, at least mildly, complaining about it.

My cousin’s unhappiness with her wired connection provides some two-sided insight, both into the appeal wireless Internet service has in rural areas and into why lots of people don’t think wireless broadband technology will ever be the best answer to rural access questions.

It keeps getting better and more attractive, but we keep wanting more, perhaps more than wireless can deliver to everybody.

Verizon earlier this month announced its HomeFusion product, offering rural wireless Internet access faster than many urban residents have today and riding on the company’s expanding 4G network. You stick a bucket-sized antenna on the side of your house and pay $60 a month and, presto, you allegedly get downloads speeds of up to 12 megabits per second and upload speeds up to five megabits per second. That’s faster than a lot of people get in the Twin Cities.

Verizon is starting in three markets in other parts of the country and then promising service nationwide. In Minnesota, Verizon predicts that it will offer 4G coverage to all its territory, and by extension, offer HomeFusion to virtually the entire state, by the end of 2013.

That raises the question again whether wireless is ultimately the answer to the rural access problem. Since computing is shifting more and more to mobile applications anyway, can’t we just skip past all these expensive fiber optic cable projects people are proposing and building?

First of all, be clear that the Verizon offering itself does not make the answer to that question yes.

Your $60 gets you enough data to watch maybe a couple movies a month. (You can pay more for more data.) At their best, the speeds promised barely meet Minnesota’s broadband goals for everyone by 2015. (By comparison, typical fiber optics promise speeds of 100 megabits per second, both download and upload, and don’t get mired in data cap issues.)

And indeed, Verizon is careful not to say their wireless offerings will make rural fiber unneeded.

“We offer choices,” company spokeswoman Debra Lewis said. “This is for people who have limited broadband choice or for whom this is the right choice.”

In addition, there are conflicting claims that wireless providers’ promises either exaggerate what is delivered or underplay what people ultimately experience.

But for some, my cousin probably included, it definitely would be an improvement and so it makes you wonder about the long-term potential. What happens after the next improvement to wireless?

(Background: Wireless Internet service relies on hundreds of towers scattered about the landscape. Each of such access points receives service via a cable or microwave signal and then broadcasts wirelessly to homes and businesses within a several-mile radius. Limits in the past have involved speed, how much data can move and obstacles like rocks and trees. Things are improving on each front.)

I put the question to a number of people the past couple weeks and came away with this:

–Wireless broadband offerings from Verizon, AT&T and small regional providers like MVTV Wireless in Granite Falls, it seems likely, will be part of the way Minnesota achieves ubiquitous broadband coverage. As it improves, it will satisfy more residents. And it’s hard to extend fiber everywhere.

–At the same time, wireless seems destined to have difficulty catching up. For a long time, at least, speeds and the amount of data users can get will fall well short of what can be carried to your home on a fiber. To many people, that means to the extent that an area relies on wireless, that area will have “second class” service.

And that is something some people just hate, down to their bones, when they contemplate the ways business, medicine, education, entertainment and other fields increasingly demand robust service. What I can do in the Twin Cities, my cousin wants to do on her farm, and some say, only fiber can deliver that.

“Most tech futurists would say we need them both” said Bill Coleman, who runs the broadband and economic development consulting firm Community Technology Advisors. Simply put, for some people at least, wireless works, he said.

But “the ability to attract and retain young people and creative class workers is a top goal of most communities these days,” Coleman said. “So the fiber is expensive but so would be declining population and school enrollments.”

And that leaves some communities with perplexing problems, it seems to me. If wireless satisfies enough demand to sap support for fixed-wire projects that promised fiber to the farm, what happens in a place like Sibley County, where residents and officials are contemplating ways to extend wired networks for farms?

You can find a clue, perhaps, in the federal stimulus project awarded to the Woodstock Telephone Co. to lay fiber in southwestern Minnesota. Apparently, little or no progress has been made on the project. At the government’s tracking site, Recovery.com, the company cited as a reason for diminished feasibility that another company was awarded money for wireless service over part of the service area.

Woodstock officials didn’t return calls. But Dan Richter, who runs the wireless service in question, MVTV Wireless, did. He allowed as how you could conclude his wireless service is making the economics harder for a wired service like Woodstock.

MVTV is upgrading its service steadily, now covering almost 20,000 square miles. It’s residential service offers speeds of 2.5 megabits but the non-profit company is preparing for 4G and faster service. He says he’s adding about 100 customers a month.

But he’s not really trying to compete with wired services. “We want to go where people aren’t,” he said. Most of his customers are rural and are switching from satellite service or dial-up service or getting Internet access for the first time. “Wireless is just one piece of the whole puzzle,” he said, but he cautioned people not to rule out the long-term potential of wireless speeds.

I asked Richter about competition from Verizon and AT&T, the big national wireless providers.

“I think I’ll be dead and gone by the time Verizon worries about 300 people in the heart of southwest Minnesota,” he said. Referring to big-company coverage claims, he added, “Come out here with your 4G smartphone. I have techs who have smartphones and I still can’t get ’em on a cell phone outside Hendricks.”

Undoubtedly, both big companies with products like HomeFusion and regional outfits like MVTV are using wireless Internet service to “enfranchise” more people with Internet access.

Still, Mitchell notes how wireless service can make the economics more difficult for those pushing for high-speed fiber networks.

“Wireless won’t meet the needs for most people and won’t lead to economic development, but it can poison the well (to use a totally overblown metaphor) for a robust next-generation network by taking 10-15 percent of the market,” he said in an email.

About the blogger

Dave Peters directs MPR’s project on community journalism, looking for ways Minnesota residents are making their towns, cities and neighborhoods better places to live. He joined MPR News in 2009 after more than 30 years as a newspaper and online reporter and editor.

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I recently switched from a cable provider (12meg down/1.5 meg up) to a fiber-to-the-home service offered by Federated in western Minnesota. For me, the 20meg down / 20 meg up plan caught my eye. Download speeds aren’t nearly as important for me (anything over 5 or so will give us netflix/hulu streaming) as two other features. First, latency. This involves the time it takes to go from you, to the website, and back. If your kids play games online, it is important – and this is where relying on cell phone internet does not meet the need. Second, upstream – this 20 meg upstream is UNHEARD OF across the state. As we take more and more videos of our family and want to share them on youtube, the files can get quite large and now, rather than taking hours to upload, it takes minutes. I have said before that my town of 700 is competing with South Korea regarding residential internet (they are way ahead of us). My friends in the metro have nowhere near these speeds.

Dave Peters

Ben — Interesting. Federated is one of the small rural phone companies that has been ahead of the curve on this. See a great photo of Kevin Beyer and all the fiber he’s bought — on Jennifer Vogel’s story today.

(Beyer directs both Farmers and Federated.)

By the way, I think I remember you trying to convince me a year or two ago that wireless would be the salvation. Am I misremembering or have you changed your mind?

C J

Wireless is quick and cheap to deploy, but has a capacity issue. All users in a geographic area share the same spectrum, and with high bitrate applications like HD movie/tv streaming and video conferencing each channel in a geographic area can become saturated pretty fast. You can make cells smaller, and antenna beamwidths tighter to improve it, but one still has the problem. Compare that to fiber where each strand can carry hundreds of gigabits per second, and one can have hundreds of strands in the 1 inch diameter cable, and multiple cables can be laid in the same trench or attached to the same pole… IMHO, save the wireless spectrum for mobile users, use fiber for users in fixed locations.

Jake

Anything beats dial-up. My parents live in the Santa Cruz mountains in California and until 4 years ago the only internet options were dial-up (cheapish but slow) or satellite (hideously expensive and largely unreliable). Then a small local company started providing broadband based on line-of-sight radio technologi. It’s still not super cheap (starting at $50/mo for 25Mbps with a 16gb/mo cap), but it beats the other options hands down. Until the major communications companies begin running hard lines to rural communities, wireless technologies like this will really be the only reasonable option. As someone else mentioned above, though, there will probably be a point at which the infrastructure can no longer handle the growth and service will suffer.

The wireless spectrum is already getting jammed due to smart phones. The switch from analog to digital TV was due to the demand for more of the wireless spectrum going to cell phones.

With that demand still growing, there’s talk of shifting some of the spectrum dedicated to local OTA TV to wireless providers. I can’t see shifting home (and I suppose some business) usage from wired to wireless being a good idea en masse.

Julie

I hate my wireless internet. In Wisconsin, I lived 10 miles out of Eau Claire and was able to get fiber optic. The TV, Phone and Internet were 100 per month. I pay 80+ for wireless internet now, add phone and satelite TV and I am paying around 250 a month. And, I live 2 miles off a 4 lane highway. Something is wrong with that.

Ben Winchester

Hi Dave,

Yep, it was probably more like 3-4 years ago I talked about a WIMAX solution to reach folks living in the countryside. The bandwidth, and range, is greater than standard wireless. It is not necessarily a long term solution but with the lack of investment in rural broadband (at the time I talked about this with you) it was the only viable solution I saw to reach areas that do not have population density to offset the high costs of infrastructure.. Today, it’s part of the 4G technologies. By the way, Julie, you are welcome to move to west central Minnesota!!

http://facebook.com/rdkisling Roland D Kisling

I live 12 mi from Stillwater in Somerset WI,broadband is nonexistent DSL is slow and expensive.Local phone company monopoly so I went wireless 3g after satellite was too expensive.

3g provider capped the the data after I was committed a few months,I got a 2nd provider of 3G so I had enough to watch Netflix but I pay $120 mo for crappy speed and volume.

I’m 10 mi from 4G but may as well be 10000 mi away and 4G isn’t optimal for today’s needs.